Osama Viagara

osama viagara medicine box
Osama Viagara. Spend now and save. A mini-site and 30 second videoclip conceived back in 2001 with VJ Skatter ( a super mellow dreadlocked near-New Yorker who moved to Brisbane for a year or so ), with voice-over by Ricardo Dominguez ( a charismatic radical activist who happened to be in Sydney for the dLux media festival ) & shuffled into web designery by Dot Grady ( aka Kawa Sumo ). Clicking through the O-V links reminds how absurd the world was back then, and how little it has changed since.

by Sean Healy, November 10, 2005 0 comments

Car Wreck Panorama Photos

car wreck panorama
Just uploaded some images from a photo shoot and filming at a wrecker’s in Coburg a while ago. The shoot was for a 5 minute video ‘T-Wrecks’, exploring the life of someone living alone in a car wreckers, for an exhibition called ‘The Future is A Wonderfully Fucked Place” at the legendary White House gallery in Brisbane. ‘T-Wrecks’ was actually made up of 40 small video clips that played randomly on a DVD player at the gallery, so the photos and video were mostly just trying to set the post-apocalyptic scene, with occasional glimpses of my friend living his daily life amongst the wreckage. And a monkey masked girl wearing a strap-on in the back of a panel-van.

Car wreckers are such visually potent and fun places to visit, full of crazy textures and colours for later tweaking. Also had much fun combining some of the car wreck photos into panoramas within qtvr software, then tweaking the qtvr software in weird ways to provide these kind of twisted panoramic strips. Will upload the video to the wonderful archive.org video hosters some time soon. Photos here for now.

by Sean Healy, November 9, 2005 0 comments

Getting Your Game Engines On

Proprietary consoles, graphics cards and licencing issues mean that the average cost to develop a major console computer game is an incredibly expensive affair, and is set to increase to match the next generation of consoles. ( And really – how much must it have cost Electronic Arts to recently hire Steven Spielberg to work on 3 games? ) There’s a wealth of DIY gaming options going on though…

Lua Player enables beginners to create their own PSP games using the Lua programming language. No need to compile any code, simply edit the text file, drop your graphics and sounds into the folder and copy to the PSP. Non-programming PSP users can also browse games and software available from the galleries.

www.jharbour.com/gameboy/default.aspx – hosts a free e-book for programming The Nintendo Game Boy Advance – a highly-anticipated book not released in book stores due to legal problems with Nintendo. (via makezine.com)

www.machinima.com – use game engines to create virtual sets for making your own movies.
via selectparks.net – sonichima ( games as real-time sound production tools, coined by avant-garde digital artist Julian Oliver (not Victor Todorović as I’d mistakenly taken from the select site b4 >>thanks, marta below)
www.hlcomic.com/view.php?date=2005-05-01 – Comic Strip made using screenshots from the Half Life game.

And while on the game-engine-as-artistic-tool tip – let’s remember what they are good at – optimising the use of your graphics cards rather than your CPU ( meaning better performance), and they offer the chance to play with physics, animation, textures, shadows, lighting controls, camera paths & angles, perspective, artificial intelligence and gameplay.

UnReal Tournament 3 is a popular game engine for tweakers, and the Quake III game Engine Open Source was recently released ( go build an app). Open source 3D software like Panda 3D or Blender is also great for 3D work, and Pilgrim 3D offers much of the game engine approach pretty effectively within a real-time VJ package ( PC only).

by Sean Healy, November 9, 2005 2 Comments

Black Market Gaming

Parallel to the console blockbusters, another model for game development and revenue has emerged – subscription based ‘massively multiplayer online games’ (MMOG’s), where hundreds, thousands or many more players can simultaneously interact in an online game world. More than a few of my friends leave events early to go back inside these games, and with about 50 active games and upwards of 2 or 3 million people playing at any one time, they are far from alone ( in being alone with their computer ).

The vast populated continents within World of Warcraft are one of the most popular online game destinations in the Western World, but in high bandwidth Korea, a single game called Lineage claims more than four million players, and www.muonline.com – claims to have 40 million registered accounts. Add games like Star Wars Galaxies and There.com, and the monthly subscription fees really start to add up. Even more fascinating though, are the emerging in-game economies, where virtual ‘assets’ are gathered or made and sold for real cash on ebay.

Online 3-D worlds are social spaces, and so more entrepreneurial in-game characters have started exploiting their abilities to create virtual clothes and customized graphics.
“One of the leading clothes designers is making $3,000 to $4,000 a month, which is a full-time job,” says There.com’s founder, Will Harvey. Also popular with in-game designers making income is http://secondlife.com/ which has recently allowed free members to roam within.

Dwarfing the virtual trinkets is www.project-entropia.com, where a virtual space station / resort was recently bought for $100,000 in an auction, effortlessly jumping past last year’s auctioned island for $26,500. DJ Neverdie ( www.realityport.com) bought the space resort Club and wants to develop it into the “Greatest virtual night club in the Universe”.
“I’m already in talks with some of the worlds biggest DJs about spinning live sets inside the nightclub,” said Neverdie. “Gamers want to be entertained while they play, hunt, socialise and craft, and because of the real cash economy aspects of Project Entropia, they can afford to pay for their entertainment.”
And rounding out the black market – www.mmorgy.com – a blog covering online game kinks and sex-mods within World of Warcraft and Anarchy Online.

by Sean Healy, November 9, 2005 0 comments

Stealth ( & Google Map ) Games Online

With the forthcoming Nintendo, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 gaming consoles horizon-hovering like gigantic, death-coated spaceships, a worthwhile dip beneath the empire radar, nevertheless reveals – a wealth of stealth, DIY and black market options for the discerning gamer.

It’s hardly surprising online games are booming, given their ease of distribution and their lack of console related development costs. These are only a tiny grab of the games and game portals kicking along :

www.gamesareart.com – arty games to play, amongst reviews, musings and other news.
www.avantgaming.com – arty game blog
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu – More game blogness.
www.game-oldies.com – Play thousands of classic arcade and console video games in your browser.
http://play-free-online-games.com/games/games_all.html – uhuh.
www.b3ta.com/games – Crude, toilet humoured perversions done like only the British can seem to manage.
www.gametrailers.com – Spy clips of latest games in progress.

www.amanitadesign.com/samorost – utterly enchanting flash game by makers of The Polyphonic Spree promo game a while back. ( http://questfortherest.com )

http://urbandead.com – Must.Kill.Zombies. Free multi-player game of survivor vs zombie outbreak in a quarantined city.
http://gunbound.net – Free anime style role playing game with gorgeous graphics.
www.darkeden.com/en– Vampire or Slayers wanted for free horror role playing game.
www.endless-online.com – Another free monster filled role playing game.

Google Map Games
Aside from annoying the National Defence & Security officers of many nations, the globe-browsing capacities of Google Earth have also spawned a few games:

www.googleearthing.com – Decipher screenshots from Google Earth and try to figure out where they are from.
www.googleearthhacks.com/war – Build armies to go around the world and capture cities, “the first truly interactive game built using Google Earth”
www.ashotoforangejuice.com/gmrisk.html – Risk via googlemaps
And my personal favourite – Find the Black Helicopters ( found via
http://aliasfrequencies.org/son/2005/10/20/black-helicopters/ )

by Sean Healy, November 9, 2005 0 comments